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Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2019 14:14:09 +0100
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To: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: [RFC] Explicit call-site send-by-ref syntax
From: rowan.collins@gmail.com (Rowan Collins)

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On Thu, 25 Jul 2019 at 13:32, Nikita Popov <nikita.ppv@gmail.com> wrote:

> I think it can either go forward as-is, in that it constitutes the first
> step towards bringing sanity to by-reference passing in the long term.
>


Hi Nikita,

As I mentioned before, I think this RFC is 10 years too late: if this goes
ahead, we'll be telling a lot of people "You know all those reference
annotations you removed when you upgraded to PHP 5.4? You have to put them
all back again now!"

To be clear, forcing a parameter to be by-reference against the signature
of the called function was a bad feature, and this proposal would have been
better. But without a time machine, I think this will cause more confusion
than it brings value.

Adding "out" and "inout" keywords, as mentioned in "future scope", is a
much more powerful change, won't require any opt-in modes or breaks to
existing code, and would be looking forward rather than backward. It's hard
to see how tweaking the meaning of "&" will lead us closer to that, making
it feel more like "alternative" than "future".

(For those without threaded mail clients, the RFC in question is
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/explicit_send_by_ref Incidentally, the "Proposed
for" on the RFC needs updating!)

Regards,
-- 
Rowan Collins
[IMSoP]

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